Wednesday, December 19

This was posted by someone from the regular forum I am at.Story about a brave girl.

-----------DETROIT–As the gunman was about to open fire, 7-year-old Alexis Goggins lunged from the back seat of the SUV and threw herself across her mom, crying, "Don't hurt my mother!"

Six bullets from the handgun slammed into Alexis, one piercing her right eye. Two slugs hit her mother.

Alexis's mother pulled through. But two weeks later, Alexis lies in critical condition, blind in one eye. To her classmates and many in a city depressingly familiar with violence, the little girl is a hero.

"She was trying to save me," her mother, Seliethia Parker, 30, said yesterday. "My baby is just an angel to her mother. I thought as the mother, I'd be saving my child. I never thought my daughter would be saving me."

Alexis has had three operations since the shooting. Her mother, who was released from hospital after being grazed by one slug and hit in the chest by another, sits by her daughter's hospital bed.

Parker's ex-boyfriend, Calvin Tillie, 29, a former convict on parole, is charged with two counts of assault with intent to commit murder and could get life in prison.

Alexis is learning-disabled, lagging behind others her age. As a result, police say it may never be known if she meant to shield her mother. But Parker said that if her daughter hadn't put herself in between: "I really don't know. We might have been dead."

Parker said she met Tillie earlier this year and he harassed her when they broke up after three months.

Shortly after midnight Dec. 2, Alexis and her mother climbed into a friend's vehicle to go to a late-night birthday get-together.

Tillie jumped from the shadows and into the SUV, next to Alexis in the back seat, police say. The driver told him she had to stop for gas and called 911, but heard shots erupt from the vehicle, where Parker was in the front passenger seat.

Officers found Alexis curled beneath the steering wheel in a pool of blood and arrested Tillie at the scene. His lawyer, Kim Basen Michon, has asked that Tillie undergo a psychological evaluation.

In addition to losing her right eye, Alexis was shot in the chin and jaw. Several days after the shooting the little girl, her face bandaged, stirred and squeezed her mom's hand.

"She is doing much better," Parker said. "She opened up one eye. Everything seems to be going great."

In Alexis's special education classroom, classmates have named a stuffed toy with pink ears "Hero."

"We didn't want Alexis's spot to be vacant, so she's got a sweet bear to sit in her place until she comes back," said teacher Angela Lang.

Alexis has epilepsy and suffered a stroke before her first birthday.

Her teacher showed off a journal revealing Alexis's writing progress in past months. An illegible series of lines have evolved into distinct letters.

"I know she can do it (recover)," said her mother's cousin, Tonya Blockett-Colbert. There's no stopping Alexis. It may take her a little longer now because of this. But she is a fighter."

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About the Author: Shingo T thinks that men who hurt children should have their eyeballs gouged out by hungry rodents.